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Reddit will begin charging for access to its API
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2023
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Technology
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Reddit could add anti-bot restrictions, but they don't, because bots drive up their "engagement" numbers. This is entirely two-faced. They essentially just want to make some money off of something they already see as benefitting them.
I was thinking specifically of bots that are associated with a community, like moderation aids or Wheel of Time's Lews Therin quote bot. I'm not sure the bots you're thinking of actually do increase engagement numbers if they can be detected. Advertisers are only interested in human eyeballs.
Very true, but this reveals the conflicts of interest between these social media companies, and the advertisers they sell space to. They want to say to advertisers: buy an ad on our site, it will reach thousands of real people! See all this activity! When in reality a lot of that activity is bot generated.
Both advertisers and users want to reach and talk to real people, but it's in these social media companies interest to inflate their numbers and fake engagement any way they can.
This isn't a small problem either, I've heard it said that half of all tweets, and a good percentage of youtube comments are from bots.
It's even a reason for those companies not to sell "no advertisement" subscriptions to their users. Reddit could offer something like that, but it would mean to lose the most valuable eyeballs (which belong to the humans who can afford to pay for not seeing ads) when it comes to marketing the website to advertisers.